WPS5383
Policy Research Working Paper 5383
Equity in Climate Change
An Analytical Review
Aaditya Mattoo
Arvind Subramanian
The World Bank
Development Research Group
Trade and Integration Team
July 2010
Policy Research Working Paper 5383
Abstract
How global emissions reduction targets can be achieved India, Indonesia, and the Philippines, but hurt industrial
equitably is a key issue in climate change discussions. countries as well as many other developing countries. The
This paper presents an analytical framework to principle of preserving future development opportunities has
encompass contributions to the literature on equity in the appeal that it does not constrain developing countries
climate change, and highlights the consequences--in in the future by a problem that they did not largely cause
terms of future emissions allocations--of different in the past, but it shifts the burden of meeting climate
approaches to equity. Progressive cuts relative to historic change goals entirely to industrial countries. Given the
levels--for example, 80 percent by industrial countries strong conflicts of interest in defining equity in emission
and 20 percent by developing countries--in effect accord allocations, it may be desirable to shift the emphasis of
primacy to adjustment costs and favor large current international cooperation toward generating a low-carbon
emitters such as the United States, Canada, Australia, oil technology revolution. Equity considerations would then
exporters, and China. In contrast, principles of equal per play a role not in allocating a shrinking emissions pie but
capita emissions, historic responsibility, and ability to pay in informing the relative contributions of countries to
favor some large and poor developing countries such as generating such a pie-enlarging revolution.
This paper--a product of the Trade and Integration Team, Development Research Group--is part of a larger effort in the
department to understand the development implications of climate change mitigation. Policy Research Working Papers
are also posted on the Web at http://econ.worldbank.org. The author may be contacted at amattoo@worldbank.org.
The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development
issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the
names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those
of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and
its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.
Produced by the Research Support Team
Equity in Climate Change: An Analytical Review
Aaditya Mattoo and Arvind Subramanian
Keywords: environment, climate change, mitigation, emissions, equity
JEL code: Q5
The authors are respectively with the World Bank, and Peterson Institute for International Economics and Center for
Global Development (CGD). This paper draws upon the author's previous work on climate change, including with
Nancy Birdsall. For valuable discussions, advice and guidance, we are grateful to Montek Ahluwalia, Nancy
Birdsall, Allen Blackman, Ralph Bryant, Michael Clemens, William Cline, Navroz Dubash, Jeff Frankel, Trevor
Houser, Gary Hufbauer, Alan Gelb, Olivier Jeanne, Paul Joffe, Vijay Joshi, Devesh Kapur, Vijay Kelkar, Kseniya
Lvovsky, Pratap Mehta, Varad Pandey, Nitin Patel, Jairam Ramesh, Dani Rodrik, David Roodman, Lord Nicholas
Stern, Mike Toman, Jacob Werksman, David Wheeler, John Williamson, and colleagues at the World Bank,
Peterson Institute and CGD. Dan Hammer, Jolly Rosa, and Daniel Xie provided valuable assistance in analyzing the
data. We are grateful to Valentina Bossetti, Jeffrey Frankel, Henry Jacoby and Sergey Paltsev for sharing the results
of their papers. The views expressed here are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the institutions that
they are associated with.
Executive Summary
Even as the world contemplates stronger action to reduce CO2 emissions to prevent
catastrophic climate change, how this goal can be accomplished equitably has become
central to the debate. This paper presents an analytical framework to encompass the existing
contributions to the literature on equity in climate change. It seeks, in particular, to highlight the
consequences--in terms of future emissions allocations--of different approaches to equity. The
review yields the following conclusions.
There is no denying that today industrial countries have substantially greater per capita
CO2 emissions than developing countries. This wide gap reflects substantially higher usage of
energy per capita in industrial countries. There is less agreement on how equity considerations
should inform future action on climate change, reflected in the different proposals that have been
made.
Four equity-based proposals recur in the literature. These suggest that emissions allocations
be: (i) allocated equally on a per capita basis; (ii) inversely related to historic responsibility for
emissions; (iii) inversely related to ability to pay; and (iv) directly related to future development
opportunities. The case has also been made for adjustment costs to be taken into account in
emissions allocations.
Taking account of country-based adjustment costs tends to favor the status quo emissions
allocations. The proposals in Stern (2007) and in UNDP (2008), which use 1990 as a base for
calculating emissions reductions going forward, are implicitly "grandfathering" existing
emissions allocations, and are in spirit attempting to give weight to adjustment costs by softening
the impact of emissions reductions on those who have to make the largest reductions. It turns out
that even reasonably progressive cuts relative to historic levels--for example, 80 percent by
industrial countries and 20 percent by developing countries-- in effect accord primacy to
absolute adjustment costs. Such proposals therefore favor large current emitters such as the
United States, Canada, Australia, the oil exporters and China, at the expense of the emissions
frugal.
Other principles of equal per capita emissions, historic responsibility and ability to pay
favor some large and poor developing countries such as India, Indonesia, the Philippines,
Pakistan and Nigeria. In any purely equity-based approach going forward, these countries
would not be required to assume mitigation commitments. China would, however, be required to
make cuts because its projected business-as-usual emissions are higher than those of the
countries named above and higher than what its allocations would be under these principles.
However, these equity principles would hurt not just industrial countries but other
developing countries. Thus, a weakness of these proposals is that each of them would inflict
unjustified economic costs on some poor countries that do not receive emissions allocations
needed to sustain growth. The reason is that the overall carbon budget must be cut significantly
to meet climate change goals and since these equity principles allocate a substantial chunk of the
shrunken budget to large and poor countries, there is very little left for the small and poor. In so
1
far as the allocations provided to the large and poor countries are in excess of their growth needs,
they could be seen as largesse unjustified by climate change considerations alone.
The principle of "preserving future development opportunities" is most appealing because
it is closest to the notion that developing countries should not be constrained in the future
by a problem that they did not largely cause in the past. If we assume that incomes of
different countries tend to converge over time, which has some empirical support and normative
appeal, then developing countries have the greatest economic opportunities. Preserving these
opportunities under current technological options would require emissions allocations to all
developing countries close to their projected business-as-usual levels. As a result, this principle
minimizes conflicts within developing countries. It also has the virtue of not making climate
change an instrument for income redistribution for reasons unrelated to climate change. This
principle implies that the burden of meeting climate change goals would fall entirely on
industrial countries which would be obliged to make drastic cuts in emissions, especially if
China's large business-as-usual emissions have to be accommodated.
Hence, the key point that emerges is that conflicts of interest are both inherent and
strong--perhaps irreconcilably so--in discussions of equity in emission allocations. They
are inherent because the exercise is about allocating a fixed aggregate carbon budget. They are
strong because the budget is not really fixed but shrinking dramatically relative to the growing
needs of developing countries. Science demands drastic compression in aggregate emissions in
order to keep temperatures below reasonable levels with reasonable probability. Given current
rates of technological progress, the available carbon budget is not even adequate to sustain
business-as-usual growth rates for developing countries, let alone for the world as a whole. The
required cuts would only be small enough to be politically acceptable if there were radical--
historically unprecedented--technological breakthroughs that allowed significantly higher levels
of growth and energy consumption for given levels of emissions.
It may, therefore, be desirable to shift the emphasis of international cooperation toward
generating a low-carbon technology revolution; equity would have a key but different role
in shaping such international cooperation. Equity would be less about mediating the allocation
of a fixed emissions pie than about informing the contributions of different countries in
generating a low-carbon technology revolution so as to enlarge this pie. Such a revolution can
transform climate change into a non-zero sum game, offering perhaps the only hope of
reconciling the development needs of low-income countries with the climate change goals of
humanity.
2
"...and the awareness
of things ill done and done to others' harm
which once you took for exercise of virtue."
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Little Gidding
I. Introduction
In some fundamental sense, the equity debate in the context of climate change has been an
attempt on the part of developing countries to create or instill an "awareness" in industrial
economies of the "harm" they are believed to have caused during their remarkable economic and
industrial progress beginning with the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s. Of course, the
harm to others from carbon-based progress was largely, and until recently, an unintended
consequence (collateral damage) of virtuous industrialization. But instilling this awareness of
past ills is nevertheless felt to be critical to generating the right "narrative" so that climate change
negotiations going forward can produce equitable outcomes that all countries can live with and
hence abide by.
But what are the ills? What is the harm? Should we move beyond notions of "ill" and "harm?"
More broadly, how should one think about equity and achieving it going forward? This essay
provides an analytical structure to bring together the existing attempts at answering these
questions. The literature on equity in climate change is voluminous. This paper will not attempt
to cover all the contributions that have been made on equity and climate change but focus on the
more important and more recent ones.
At the outset, it is worth asking why equity has acquired such salience in the context of climate
change. The chart and table below suggest a reason. Chart 1 plots per capita CO2 emissions
against GDP per capita (PPP) for a sample of fifty countries for the latest year (2008) for which
data are available.1 The chart shows a positive and statistically significant relationship between
these two variables: richer countries have substantially greater per capita emissions. Table 1
provides data on energy use (comprising household energy and road travel) per capita for some
of the major industrial and developing countries. That many of the developing countries consume
a fraction of the energy consumed in the rich world suggests that many energy needs remain
unmet: for example, the average Indian's energy consumption is one-twentieth of US levels.
That the current distribution of emissions and energy use across the world is highly inequitable is
widely recognized. How equity considerations should inform future action on climate change is
less clear.
1
We discuss the choice of sample below.
3
Chart 1: International Distribution of Emissions, 2008
4
ARE
Log of emissions (in tons) per capita, 2008 KWT
SGP
AUS USA
3
SAU
CAN
NLD
BEL
KAZ RUS HKG
KOR
CZEGRC DEU
ISR JPN
ZAF GBR
UKR POL ESP AUT
ITA
2
IRN
BLR
VEN FRA
MYS
UZB CHN ROM
ARG
MEX
THA CHL
TUR
IRQ DZA
1
BRA
IDN EGY
COL
IND MAR
VNM
0
PAK PHL
NGA
7 8 9 10 11
Log of GDP (PPP) per capita, 2008
Chart 2. Energy use per capita relative to United States, 2005 (percent)
4
This paper is organized as follows. Sections II and III spell out the different dimensions of
equity, with the former covering the equity principles and the latter highlighting two distinctions,
between emissions allocations and cuts, and between starting with the individual versus the
country as the unit of analysis. Section IV quantifies the various principles and proposals that
emerge from the literature as being important for determining equity, while Section V presents a
general framework that encompasses the literature so that specific proposals emerge as special
cases. Section VI undertakes a simple quantitative analysis, presenting results for future
emissions allocations for a number of specific proposals, and highlighting the consequences of
the different principles. In Section VII, we elaborate on the limitations of our analysis as well as
ways in which it can be refined and extended. Section VIII offers some concluding remarks.
At the outset, we should clarify a few points about the paper. It will not attempt to discuss the
range of important institutional issues in the climate change debate (whether Kyoto should or
should not be renewed; what is the appropriate location for future climate financing
arrangements; nature of monitoring, reporting, and verification requirements etc). The
quantification in this paper is illustrative and deliberately simple. It is not based on sophisticated
climate change or economic models where the relationship between principles, unit of analysis
and resulting emissions allocations tends to be opaque. Also, the quantitative exercise will be
based entirely on emissions of CO2 rather than all greenhouse gases. In principle, the allocations
should cover all greenhouse gases but the focus on CO2 is a choice dictated by data availability.
The paper does not address any issues of science which we take as given by the consensus
underlying the UNFCCC process. The paper's focus is a narrow public policy one: to use data
and simple quantification to review, encompass, and possibly shed some new light on, the equity
debate in the international climate change negotiations.
II. Principles for Determining Equity
Central to our analysis will be the principles for determining emissions allocations. Equity can be
based on certain inherent notions of fairness, including concepts of rights, regardless of their
consequences. Equity can also be evaluated in terms of the "consequences" of different
emissions allocations and typically these consequences relate to economic outcomes or economic
welfare of individuals and for nations. The former is the deontological approach while the latter
is referred to as the consequentialist (or welfarist) approach (Posner and Weisbach, 2010; Dietz,
Hepburn and Stern, 2008).2
Our reading suggests that four principles for the equitable allocations of emissions recur in the
literature, encompassing both fairness-based or intrinsic criteria as well as consequentialist
criteria. We also consider another criterion based on adjustment costs. (Table 1 below lists the
various papers that have contributed to the equity literature and highlights the principle or
principles advocated in each of them.)
2
A point on terminology: in the literature, and in this paper, both emissions allocations and emissions rights are
used interchangeably. But it should be noted that the conceptual basis of the term "emissions rights" is not
uncontroversial. Stern (2009b) argues forcefully that while there can be rights to "goods," for example, enjoying the
environmental services of the atmosphere, there is no symmetric right to "bads" such as the right to pollute the
global commons. Even if we use the term emissions rights, we do not intend it to connote an ethical right to
pollution.
5
Table 1. Equity principles proposed in the climate change literature
Principles Equal per Historic Ability Preserving Adjustment
capita responsibility to pay future costs
Papers emissions development
opportunities
Agarwal and Narain Y Y
(1991), Saran (2009),
Ghosh (2010)
Antholis (2009) N
Baer et. al. (2007) Y Y
Bhagwati (2009) Y
Birdsall and Y
Subramanian (2009)
Bosetti and Frankel Y Y
(2009)
Brazil (1997) Y
Cao (2008) Y Y
Chakravarti et. al. Y
(2009)
Cooper (2008) Y Y
Frankel (2007) Y Y? Y Y
GTZ (2004) Y Y Y
Joshi and Patel Y
(2009)
Jacoby et. al. (2007) Y Y Y
Kanitkar et. al. Y Y
(2010)
Meyer (2000) Y
Muller et. al (2007) Y
Pan et. al. (2008) Y
Panagariya (2009) Y
Parikh and Parikh Y Y
(2009)
Posner and Sunnstein N? Y?
(2009); Posner and
Weisbach (2010)
Spence (2009) Y
Stern (2009a) Y Y Y?
Stern (2009b)
UNDP (2008) Y
WBGU (2009) Y
Winkler et. al (2006) Y Y Y
Y implies support; N implies opposition; no entry implies neither support nor opposition;? suggests qualification .
1. Equal per capita emissions
The first fairness-based criterion is that regardless of past actions and future opportunities, every
citizen of the planet today has an equal right to the atmosphere as a reservoir for absorbing GHG
emissions. This criterion is rooted in the idea that all humans are--from the perspective of
6
enjoying the environmental services of the atmosphere--created equal. This has become widely
known as the per capita approach because it implies that per capita emissions would be the same
across countries.
This principle has been emphasized over the years by a number of developing countries and
contributions go back to Agarwal and Narain (1991), Dubash (2009), Saran (2009), and Ghosh
(2010). More recently, in the context of carbon budgeting too, the per capita principle is being
re-emphasized by the German Advisory Council on Climate change (WBGU, 2009) as well as
by Kanitkar et al. (2010). Even others such as Bosetti and Frankel (2009) and Parikh and Parikh
(2009), who do not give exclusive status to the equal per capita principle, do consider it relevant
in any discussion of equity.
Posner and Weisbach (2010), and Posner and Sunstein (2008), argue that the per capita principle
is superficially appealing but in practice is an inefficient way of attaining equity (or redressing
inequity) because population and incomes are not (negatively) correlated: that is, giving greater
emissions allocations to countries with large populations would not necessarily be the same as
giving greater emissions to poor countries. Frankel (2007) implicitly supports the equal per
capita principle as the target that all countries would attain in the very long run as their incomes
converge.
Although the targets proposed by Stern (2009a) would lead to equal per capita emissions by
2050, Stern (2009b) is ambivalent about the ethical basis of the equal per capita principle. This
ambivalence is based in part on the view that while there can be rights to "goods," for example,
enjoying the environmental services of the atmosphere, there is no symmetric right to "bads"
such as the right to pollute the global commons. It is also based in part on the view that broad
ethical claims such as rights to development or participation are more defensible than claims to a
narrower set of goods and services.
2. Historic responsibility
A second and perhaps more controversial fairness-based criterion relates future rights to
liabilities for past emissions. This notion is based on the fact that the threat of climate change
stems from the limited capacity of the atmosphere to absorb certain greenhouse gases. Thus, the
atmosphere can be likened to a reservoir. The more GHGs that have been spewed into the
atmosphere the more it fills up and the less space there is left for subsequent emissions of gases.
The historic responsibility principle suggests that the allocation of future emissions should be
inversely related to past emissions. The historic responsibility principle is based on the ethical
notion that "thou shalt not harm others" or at least not harm others "knowingly" and that if harm
is done there should be compensation. In effect, this is like the polluter pays principle in that
historic polluters "pay" by having a lesser claim to future emissions (World Bank, 2010).
This historic responsibility principle also has a long and illustrious pedigree in the climate
change negotiations. Among those who have invoked this principle include: Stern (2009b),
Winkler et al. (2006), GTZ (2004), Muller et al. (2007), Winkler (2007), Bhagwati (2009a,
2009b), Kanitkar et al. (2010), Pan et al. (2008), Panagariya (2009), Parikh and Parikh (2009),
and Dubash (2009). It has been discussed also in Posner and Sunnstein (2008), Posner and
Weisbach (2010), Cooper (2008), Joshi and Patel (2009). One of the first contributions to
7
actually elaborate on and quantify the notion of historic responsibility was the proposal made by
Brazil to the UNFCCC meetings in 1997 (hereafter Brazil, 1997).
But the notion of historic responsibility has been disputed and the exact manner of giving
expression to this notion has also been controversial. An extreme position on historic
responsibility is Cooper (2008) who argues that: "... optimal decisions generally require bygones
to be ignored. To focus on equity, and thus the alleged retrospective wrongs of the remote past, is
to assure inaction."
Posner and Weisbach (2010) argue that a retributive justice perspective on historic responsibility
normally requires establishing an injurer who behaved in a "morally culpable" way and
establishing the identity of the injured or the victim. In the climate change context, this argument
leads to the question whether the perpetrator has to be an individual or a country. If only
individuals can be responsible, then according to calculations from the Climate Analysis
Indicator Tool (CAIT), only 8 percent of the stock of emissions in 2000 can be traced to the flow
of emissions from individuals who are still alive and might be responsible for those emissions
(Table 5.1 from Posner and Weisbach (2010)).
Joshi (2010) argues that the notion of historic responsibility is: "...a persuasive claim but it runs
up against some powerful moral intuitions. The ACs (advanced countries) did not expropriate
knowingly. They acted in the belief, universally held until quite recently, that the atmosphere
was an infinite resource. Moreover, the expropriators are mostly dead and gone. Their
descendants, even if they could be identified, cannot be held responsible for actions they did not
themselves commit."
Bhagwati (2009b) argues that reparations for past harm can be imposed on countries and invokes
precedents in US law. He distinguishes between stocks and flows of emissions, arguing that
countries should pay for past damage (the stock of emissions). Although he does not argue that
past responsibility should determine future emissions allocations per se (which in his view
should be determined separately), he nevertheless argues that rich nations should pay
compensation for the damage they have caused on account of historic emissions. There is a
precedent of such a fund in the US system ­ the CERCLA (1980), commonly known as the
"Superfund", under which a tax is levied on polluting industries and liability established for
release of hazardous waste at closed and abandoned waste sites.
Whether corrective justice requires establishment of culpability on the part of the perpetrator is
still debated by philosophers. Dietz et al. (2007) note that: "One might also seek to justify
emission reductions based on the weaker notion that emitters of greenhouse gases (past, present
and future) have obligations ­ not arising from rights ­ to consider the climate damage caused,
just like a passer-by might be morally obliged to aid someone who has taken ill, even though the
ill person is unlikely to have a right to that assistance as such. Barry (1999) constructs a theory of
intergenerational justice that he argues does not depend on equal rights across generations.
Instead, it depends only on the twin notions of `responsibility' ­ that "bad outcomes for which
somebody is not responsible provide a prima facie case for compensation" (p97) ­ and `vital
8
interests' ­ namely that there are certain objective requirements that all human beings have,
regardless of their location in space or time."3
3. Ability to pay
Mitigation will impose economic costs-- in terms of reduced consumption and growth because
of higher prices of carbon and energy. Most theories of justice would suggest that insofar as
costs are imposed, these should be borne more by those whose incomes are greater. In a
utilitarian view, with diminishing marginal utilities, world welfare will be maximized--or rather
the loss in world welfare will be minimized--if those who are poorer incur lower costs. A
Rawlsian perspective would, of course, be even more strongly redistributive. In terms of a
carbon budget therefore, most ethical perspectives would require future allocations to be
inversely related to the ability (or alternately, capacity) to pay for emissions mitigation. An
extreme version of the capacity to pay--in the spirit of Rawls--is captured in the notion of
graduation, namely that there will be no burden of payment for countries/individuals below a
threshold level of income (Spence, 2009; Chakravarti et al. (2009), Bhagwati (2007b) etc.).4
This approach is also embedded in the Kyoto Protocol and reflected in the principle of common-
but-differentiated responsibilities.
Several contributions to the literature invoke the ability/capacity to pay and /or future
opportunities principle, including the GDRs (greenhouse development rights) invoked by Baer et
al. (2007), Cao (2009), Frankel (2007), GTZ (2004), Jacoby et al. (2007), and Stern (2009b).
Bosetti and Frankel (2009) make emission cuts dependent on how far a country is from a
threshold level of income
4. Preserving future development opportunities
The ability to pay principle focuses on adapting to the downside of emissions cuts (i.e. avoiding
income losses for those with lowest incomes). But this has a more positive counterpart captured,
for example, in the principle of the right to development enshrined in various United Nations
initiatives. The right to development is really about preserving the economic opportunities--in
this case by allocating sufficient carbon space in the future--for those who are currently poor. A
utilitarian perspective is that at the margin an extra unit of emission (and any resulting extra
income) will increase world welfare the most if it were allocated to the currently poor whose
marginal utility of income is the highest.
The economic opportunities principle is most explicit in Jacoby et al. (2007), who explicitly
construct a scenario in which future welfare of countries would not be compromised. Birdsall
3
There is also the issue of whether a country's responsibility should apply to the emissions it generates in
production or in consumption (see Davis and Caldeira, 2010 and Pan, Philips, and Chen, 2008).
4
The ability to pay argument has also been articulated in terms of international redistribution. According to Stern
(2009b), "Any notions of equality and justice in the allocation of emissions rights should be embedded in a broad
view of income distribution..." The point here is that allocations of emissions rights are going to have enormous
economic consequences, if not for the distribution of income at least for changes in this distribution. For example, if
the carbon budget for the period 2010-2050 is say 750 gigatons, and the average future price of carbon is $50 per
ton, climate change going forward will in effect involve distributing nearly 40 trillion dollars. Thus, while some
argue that climate change cannot be about addressing global poverty or redressing international income distribution,
the magnitudes involved will be large, dwarfing the size of current aid budgets.
9
and Subramanian (2009) derive emissions allocations under several scenarios each of which
preserves the right to economic growth and energy use of developing countries in the future.
5. Adjustment costs
The clearest ethical principles articulated in the literature are equal per capita emissions, (based
on the idea that all people are created equal); historic responsibility (based on the idea of doing
no harm to others or providing compensation for doing harm); ability to pay (based on basic
notions of distributive justice) and preservation of future economic opportunities (based also on
notions of distributive justice).
Some would argue that one or more of these four principles should be the only determinants of
equitable allocations of emissions. But others have implicitly suggested that adjustment costs
should also inform emissions allocations not necessarily because that would be equitable but in
recognition of political realities (see Bosetti and Frankel (2009)). Is there an equity rationale for
taking account of such adjustment costs?
One of the few contributions to explicitly incorporate adjustment costs is Bosetti and Frankel
(2009), who impose several adjustment cost-related constraints on their modeling of emissions
reductions. But the proposals in Stern (2007) and in UNDP (2008), which use 1990 as a base for
calculating emissions reductions going forward are implicitly "grandfathering" existing
emissions allocations, and are in spirit attempting to give weight to adjustment costs by softening
the impact of emissions reductions on those who have to make the largest reductions. It is worth
noting here that the Stern (2007) and UNDP (2008) proposals are very close in spirit to the
"contraction and convergence" ideas first proposed by Meyer (2000), which involves the global
carbon budget contracting consistent with climate change goals, with rich countries converging
down, and poor countries converging up, to a common emissions per capita target in the long
run.
One argument supporting the inclusion of adjustment costs in equity calculations stems from a
view that equity should pertain to changes (rather than levels) and that there should be some
rough parity in the economic and political pain related to these changes. In a trade context, this is
what Bhagwati has called "first-difference reciprocity": in trade negotiations, countries don't aim
to equalize the level of tariffs but to broadly equalize changes in tariffs and changes in
consequential market access. Proponents of including adjustment costs in equity principles for
climate change aim to convert the debate from emissions levels (and allocations) to emissions
cuts. Adjustments costs are likely to be greater and more compressed in time for countries that
have to make larger cuts, which are likely to be countries with large emissions to start with.
The case for reflecting other principles such as the capability to mitigate, measured, for example
by the emissions intensity of GDP (GTZ, 2004; Cao, 2009) has even more tenuous links to
equity. The argument is that the cleaner a country is, the more difficult it is to mitigate, which
should be reflected in emissions allocations. But it is important to distinguish equity from
efficiency. While it is certainly true that abatement costs will vary widely across countries, these
are not relevant for equity purposes. Abatement action being cheaper in Indonesia than in the
United States than in Indonesia is not a reason for allocating more emissions to the latter. With
10
emissions allocated equitably, trading in emissions would ill ensure that efficiency--in the sense
of mitigation taking place where abatement costs are lowest--is achieved.
III. Other Dimensions of Equity
But these principles alone are not sufficient to determine emissions allocations. Choices along
two other dimensions are necessary to do so: first, whether equity should apply to emissions
allocations or emissions cuts? Second, whether the starting point for the analysis should be the
individual or the country.
1. Emissions cuts or emissions allocations?
In the literature, the equity principles have been applied in two different ways. They have been
applied to the question of fair emissions cuts and to the question of fair emissions allocations.
Contributions that take the former approach include Bosetti and Frankel (2009), Stern (2007),
and UNDP (2008) while examples of the latter approach are Jacoby et al. (2007), Kanitkar et al.
(2010), Parikh and Parikh (2009), and GTZ (2009). Under the cuts approach it is necessary to
clearly define a baseline from which cuts would be measured. This baseline could either be some
historic or business-as-usual level. While allocations can in principle be made without reference
to a baseline, both approaches should be broadly similar in the sense that allocations imply cuts
and vice versa. But in practice they can yield very different outcomes, depending for example on
what historical benchmark is chosen and what assumptions, especially on growth rates, are made
to project the BAU.
Related to the cuts versus allocations choice is whether the focus should be on flows or
cumulative flows. It is well known that the science of climate change involves complex
interactions between stocks and flows (Stern, 2008). Emissions flows lead to build-up of stocks
and these stocks, with delays and decays, affect temperatures. Going forward, targets for
emissions reductions can be formulated as reductions in flows say between two points in time,
1990 and 2050 (Stern, 2007 and UNDP, 2008). Or they can be formulated in terms of cumulative
emissions. Insofar as the science places a limit on the total amount of emissions that are
consistent with an acceptable increase in temperature, it is more convenient to think in terms of a
carbon budget, which is really about cumulative emissions, and about how to allocate this budget
(flow targets need to be specified in terms of flow trajectories to respect the overall carbon
budget constraint).5
2. Equity for whom: Individuals or nations?
A critical dimension of equity is the unit of analysis. International cooperation on climate change
takes place between countries and the country has to remain the focus of analysis. Most of the
proposals in the literature start with the country as the unit of analysis in discussing equitable
emissions allocations (Brazil, 1997; Bhagwati, 2007; India (2010), GTZ (2004); Birdsall and
Subramanian (2009); Kanitkar et al., 2010; Parikh and Parikh, 2009; Stern (2007), UNDP
(2008). In this paper, we will start with the individual as the building block for any equity
consideration is the individual (Cao, 2008; Chakravarti et al 2009; Baer et al.2007). Ultimately,
people have rights and countries' rights and obligations derive from individuals (see Stern
(2007)). So our analysis will aggregate up from individuals to countries. In Appendix 2, we will
5
See the paper by the German Advisory Council on Climate Change (WBGU, 2009) and UNDP (2008) which argue
the merits of a carbon budgeting approach.
11
discuss how this framework can be adapted when the country is the unit of analysis. We show
that this is not an easy exercise. We also show that an ad hoc extension of the individual-based
approach to a country-level approach yields very different results. The literature on equity in
climate change has not recognized the importance of this distinction and therefore not revealed
an awareness of its consequences.
The choice of the individual as a unit of analysis is not the same as adopting an "equal per capita
principle." Starting with the individual does, however, allow for the "equal per capita" principle
to be one among several principles for allocating emissions. But the inclusion of other principles
will typically result in per capita emissions varying across countries, that is, in departing from an
equal per capita emissions outcome.
IV. Quantifying Principles and Proposals
Thus far we have defined the principles in broad terms. They need to be applied such that we can
derive and quantify every country's fair share of future emissions allocations. In the context of
allocating a given carbon budget, it helps the intuition to do the following thought experiment.
Suppose there were one representative individual in each of n countries. We want to ask what the
fair allocation of future emissions would be for that individual as a share of emissions for all
these individuals. Note that while the objective of the exercise is still to derive fair share of
emissions for countries, we begin by thinking of an individual as the ethical unit of analysis and
then aggregating to the level of a country.
If the allocation of emissions to a particular country is FEi, then the share of the representative
individual is FEi /Pi.
A country's share of emissions in per capita terms is simply its per capita emissions as a share of
the sum of per capita emissions in the world. Thinking about the typical person allows the share
to be expressed at the level of the country.
Thus: FE
i
P
EQ i (1)
i FE
i
P
i
Where EQ defines the fair share of future emissions allocation for country i. The question then
i
turns to specifying/quantifying the principles in a way that is consistent with asking what is the
fair share for the typical individual in any given country. We now discuss the principles
proposed in the literature.
1. Per capita
The per capita approach simply says that the all citizens of the world should have the same
emissions entitlements in the future.
P
i 1 / k (2)
12
where k refers to the total number of countries. So, if there were 50 countries, and all had equal
per capita emissions, the share of the representative individual would be equal to .02. This would
in turn imply that each country's emissions would simply be its share in world population at the
relevant point in time, that is, in equal per capita emissions across the world (derived in
Appendix 1).
2. Historic responsibility
Since the focus is on each person's future emissions, it would seem appropriate to measure past
emissions also in per capita terms. And since historic responsibility relates to cumulative rather
than the flow of emissions, the appropriate measure would be per capita cumulative emissions
(HE/P) from some point (1990, 1970 or 1850) in the past to the present. And since greater the
historic responsibility lower the future share, one way of specifying this principle would be to
say that current per capita share is inversely related to the share of cumulative past emissions
per capita. The inverse relationship could then be captured as:
1
HE
i
P
iHE i (3)
1
HE
P
i
i
A question that has proved contentious in the debates on equity is: when does history begin for
these purposes? Some claim that intent, or to use Eliot's words, "the awareness Of things ill
done and done to others' harm" is not necessary to use historic emissions as a relevant equity
principle (see Helm et. al (2007); Bhagwati (2009); and Cao (2009)). In this view, it would
appropriate to measure emissions going as far back as 1850 (the earliest date from which data are
available). Others, who would either advocate or concede the necessity of intent would start the
clock later. In the climate change context, the culpability argument revolves around timing: when
did it become clear (with some degree of scientific certainty) that anthropogenic GHG emissions
were a prime suspect in the threat of climate change.6
A number of analysts have converged on 1990 as the date after which no government could
plead ignorance (Parikh and Parikh (2009); Patel and Joshi (2009)) about the effects of GHGs. It
was in 1990 that negotiations that led to the UNFCCC began. However, Kanitkar et al. (2010)
argue that 1970 should be the date for assigning responsibility. In their words: "We find that the
monitoring of carbon dioxide emissions was fully recognized by the year 1972 in the Stockholm
conference on the Human Environment organized by the United Nations . We also note that prior
to this conference, in 1968, the problem of global warming due to carbon dioxide emissions had
been noted at a conference organized by the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, expressly conducted in preparation for the 1972 conference. This further justifies the
significance of 1970 as a choice of base year."
6
Muller et. al. (2008) distinguish strict responsibility from limited responsibility for historic emissions. The former
adjust historic emissions for those emissions considered to be harmless (taken to be the level of global ocean sinks).
Limited responsibility, invokes Aristotle, who argued that blame could be extenuated by ignorance or circumstances
beyond the individual's control.
13
In our analysis below, we settle on 1970 as the starting point for a more empirical reason.
Starting the clock in 1990 seems too recent to count as history and actually penalizes countries
that started growing rapidly only since then. In other words, it penalizes those very countries
that have suffered from not having had large historic emissions.
3. Ability to pay
Ability to pay for mitigation can be most easily captured in a country's per capita GDP measured
in PPP terms.7 This principle would simply say that a fair share of future per capita emissions
should be inversely related to the share of per capita GDP in world per capita GDP.
1
Y
Y i (4)
i 1
1
Y
i
Here Y is a country's per capita GDP measured in PPP terms.
4. Preserving future development opportunities
Future economic opportunities could relate both to energy needs on the consumption side and
growth on the production side, taking into account the possibility of technological progress.
These are highly correlated so economic growth is perhaps the best indicator for future economic
opportunities. Now, future economic growth has typically been predicted based on some view
about each country's prospects (as in many projections say by the International Energy Agency
(IEA), World Energy Outlook (WEO), Cline (2010)). These are necessarily subjective and
typically tend to extrapolate the recent past.
Alternatively, one might simply say that projecting growth over a long horizon should be a more
objective supply-side exercise. The simplest rule for doing so is economic convergence, namely,
that all countries would tend in the long run to converge to similar standards of living and that
future growth rates will be inversely related to current levels of per capita income. The post-war
evidence is that, although not all countries have shown signs of convergence, the major carbon
emitters (especially those in Asia) have, which renders the use of current levels of GDP as an
appropriate predictor of future growth rates (see Barro and Sala-i-Martin (2003) and Caselli
(2005) in particular for evidence on convergence). More recently, in the period (2002-2008)
leading up to the recent global financial crisis, the phenomenon of convergence has become
more wide-spread with nearly 70 percent of countries growing faster than the United States
(Johnson and Subramanian, forthcoming). In any case, it is appealing to use convergence not
just as a predictor of future growth but also as a normative basis for preserving the growth
opportunities of the poorest countries.
How would one derive a measure of the share of future emissions based on economic
opportunities? Future economic growth rates allow future emissions growth to be predicted on
7
Others have suggested the use of the UNDP's Human Development Index, for example, as a measure of ability to
pay (see GTZ, 2004).
14
the basis of certain assumed rates of technological progress. But we need a measure of the level
of future cumulative emissions. For example, China and India are expected to grow at about the
same rate in the future but China's cumulative future emissions will be much higher because of
its larger initial emissions base. Thus, to get a country's fair share of future emissions based on
preserving economic opportunities, we need to combine future economic growth and current
levels of emissions.8
OPP
i 1 Y 2
CE
i (5)
i
Where Y is the inverse share in per capita GDP as in equation (4) and CE is the per capita
i i
share in current emissions expressed as:
CE
. i
P
CE i
i (6)
CE
i
P
i
5. Adjustment costs
The reason for incorporating adjustment costs in any discussions of equity is to recognize the
importance of, and the constraints imposed by, the status quo in determining future emissions
allocations. The greater the distance between current emissions and any long term equitable
allocation (for example, given by the equal per capita principle) the greater the likely cuts and
hence the greater the adjustment costs. Thus, fair share based on adjustment costs future
economic opportunities can be obtained as a combination of the equal per capita principle and
(which reflects the long run equitable allocation) and current emissions per capita (a la Frankel
(2007)).
iADJ 1 iP 2
CE
i (7)
where EM is current emissions and P is population.
V. Encompassing Framework
We are now ready to bring together all the individual elements on which equitable allocations
can be based in one encompassing framework. This is captured in the following general
relationship:
i f ( P, HE, Y, CE)
EQ (8)
i i i, i,
8
Suppose there were no growth in a country, preserving future economic opportunities would require emissions
allocations equal to current emissions every year in the future.
15
This general formulation can take specific functional forms. For example, the function could be a
logarithmic one (as in Cao, 2010 and Baer et al., 2007). There could also be interactions between
the variables, for example between the adjustment costs term and the income term, implying that
the importance of adjustment costs would depend on a country's level of development.
As an illustrative exercise, we posit for convenience a simple linear functional relationship
between the fair share of emissions and its determinants expressed thus:
i P HE Y CE
EQ (9)
1i 2 i 3 i 4 i
Note that the equation has a simple interpretation because the left hand and each of the right
hand side variables are expressed as a share. The alphas reflect the weights to be assigned to the
different considerations. These weights add up to 1.
The advantage of this framework is that it allows us to represent the different proposals and
considerations discussed in the literature as special cases of this more general framework.9
2+ 3 =1: Much of the literature (Frankel and Valenti (2009), Stern (2009), Kanitkar et al.
(2010), Cao (2009), and Baer et al. (2007)), for example, focuses on taking account of some
combination of the income and historic responsibility considerations.
1 equal to one: This reflects the long-standing Indian proposal as well as the recent proposal
made by the German Advisory Council on Global Change (2009) to achieve equal per capita
emission allocations.
2 equal to one: This is a variant of the original Brazilian proposal that equitable allocations be
determined by historic responsibility alone. There are echoes of this proposal in Bhagwati (2009)
who suggests that countries pay reparations on the basis of past emissions. Parikh and Parikh
(2009) take this idea one step further by arguing that any taxes levied on historic emissions
should be distributed according to population.
2 equal to zero: On the other hand, some have argued that the past is irrelevant either because
bygones are bygones (Cooper, 2009) or because there is an implicit statute of limitations on
responsibility, especially since most of the individuals that contributed to past emissions have
long since died (Sunstein and Weisbach, 2010).
3 equal to one: This yields the ability-to-pay principle as proposed in Baer et al. (2007) and Cao
(2009); in Jacoby et al. (2007), one of the scenarios involves allocating emissions according to
the inverse share of per capita GDP. In other words, future emissions allocations would simply
take account of, and attempt to, redress the current international distribution of income.
9
It is worth noting that this framework is very similar to that used by the International Monetary Fund to determine
countries' quota shares and the appropriate principles. Bryant (2010) contains an excellent discussion and review of
many of the issues--political and technical--that arise in such an exercise.
16
3 + 4 equal to one: In principle, this should yield the economic opportunities principle.10 In one
of their scenarios, Jacoby et al. (2007) propose that future allocations be determined so as not to
reduce the growth of developing countries.11 Birdsall and Subramanian (2009), by focusing on
future economic opportunities, also accord a weight of one to the income variable.
1 + 4 equal to one: This yields the 80-20 cuts proposal, advocated by many including Stern
(2009) and UNDP (2008), and implicit in the position taken by the United States and EU in their
domestic legislative deliberations. The original proposal only specified emissions allocations for
industrial and developing countries in the aggregate without also elaborating how these would be
allocated amongst these two groups of countries. However, the spirit behind the proposal is
explained in Stern (2009), who derives this from a loose application of the equal per capita
principle in 2050: that is, there should be convergence in per capita emissions by 2050. 12 In our
framework, we are able to generate this outcome for emissions in 2050 by assigning a weight of
0.15 to the per capita principle and a weight of 0.85 to the adjustment costs principle. Implicitly,
therefore, this 80-20 cuts proposal can be thought of as giving weight to adjustment costs (which
are considered to be greater the larger are current emissions) but moderating that to take account
of the need to converge to equal per capita emissions in the future.
VI. Results
We now present results--in terms of the consequences for emissions allocations for countries--
for the major proposals in the literature. We first highlight the consequences to major emitters of
applying the individual elements identified in equation 9. We then elaborate on the consequences
of emissions allocations relative to business-as-usual for five proposals that are closely related to
these individual elements.
Our results below are all based on a sample of 50 countries that collectively account for about 94
percent of the world's emissions in 2008 and about 75 percent of the world's population (the list
of countries is presented in Appendix Table 1). The sample is based on an emissions threshold--
of 0.7 tons per capita--and an income threshold--of $2000 per capita GDP in 2008 and
measured in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms--in terms of income. Broadly, we wanted to
include the largest current and (potentially) future emitting countries that are likely to be key to
achieving successful cooperation.
All our results require that we derive country-level emissions. The process of deriving this for
the individual-as-unit approach is described in Appendix 1. We assume, following the German
Advisory Council on Global Change, that the total cumulative carbon budget for fossil-based
emissions for the period 2010 to 2050 is 750 gigatons, which would ensure a 67% probability of
meeting the 2 degrees centigrade guard rail. If we assume that the share of the emissions for the
10
The algebra suggests that some combination of current emissions and current per capita GDP (which captures
future growth prospects) should capture the economic opportunities principle, but we are unable to precisely obtain
the allocation levels that correspond to the business-as-usual scenario. We are, however, able to obtain a high
correlation (close to 0.95) between allocations using the formula above and the actual business-as-usual allocation.
11
Strictly, speaking Jacoby et. al. (2007) preserve welfare not growth. When emissions are tradable the former
approach leads to somewhat smaller allocations for developing countries but the two approaches should be broadly
similar.
12
This is only a lose application because per capita incomes themselves would not converge by 2050, so why the
equal per capita principle should apply at that point rather than at another point is not clear.
17
countries in our sample, remains broadly unchanged, this would imply a budget for our 50-
country sample of 704 gigatons.
Before presenting the results, we would re-emphasize a few points. The quantitative exercise
should be seen as illustrative and not definitive and not least because there are many degrees of
freedom. For example, the principles that we have discussed can be measured differently (ability
to pay can be captured by the UNDP's Human Development index rather than per capita GDP).
The measures can be standardized differently (we have standardized by expressing all the
variables as shares but these variables could all be expressed as deviations from the mean). We
have chosen a linear specification when logarithmic or other functional forms are possible.
1. Impact of principles
It is helpful to begin by spelling out the implications of individual principles before describing
the implications of proposals that are based on them. Charts 3A and 3B show the impact of the
different principles on total and per capita emissions allocations across countries,
respectively.13We illustrate this impact by depicting the allocations for each of the principles as
the sole basis for determining equitable allocations (i.e. we successively assign weights of one to
each of the right hand side variables in equation 9).
Not surprisingly, different principles favor different countries. Countries such as China, India
and Indonesia benefit from, and the US and EU are hurt by, the historic responsibility principle.
The converse is true when allocations are based on current emissions per capita (because it is this
variable that captures adjustment costs and motivates some of the more well-known proposals in
the literature). Allocations based on GDP per capita favor the poorest countries such as India and
Indonesia (see Chart 3B in particular). It is noteworthy that this principle gives India over two
times as much as China in emissions per capita, reflecting China's higher income level.
Similarly, India receives about three-and-a-half times emissions per capita as Brazil under the
ability-to-pay principle because of the corresponding income differentials (Chart 3B), and this
translates into even larger differences in total emissions because India's population is about six
times greater (Chart 3A).
Per capita allocations are very similar under the historic emissions and ability-to-pay principles.
It is also noteworthy that both historic emissions and ability-to-pay principles yield greater per
capita allocations than under the equal per capita emissions principle for countries such as India
and Indonesia. For China and Brazil the converse is true. This shows that as long as countries are
far away from converging to common levels of economic development, the poorer countries may
be better off embracing principles other than the equal per capita principle.
13
The Charts in Appendix 2 show the impact of the different principles on the emissions allocations under the
country-level approach.
18
Chart 3A. Cumulative Emissions Allocations, 2010-2050 (gigatons)
19
Chart 3B. Cumulative Emissions Allocations per capita, 2010-2050 (tons per capita)
Note: With one exception, both charts show allocations for the major countries if each of the principles were the
sole basis for allocations (i.e. as if the alphas in equation 9 were set to one.
We show the correlation between the individual elements in Appendix 3 which provides a clue to
what might happen if these individual elements were to be combined, as they are in some of the
20
proposals in the literature. There is a high degree of correlation (0.85) between per capita GDP
and historic responsibility. This suggests that these two variables might be capturing similar
notions, which we discuss below, and that these principles will tend to re-inforce each other. But
there is also a fairly high negative correlation between these two principles, on the one hand, and
the adjustment costs principle on the other so that the latter will work in the opposite direction.
2. Impact on countries relative to business-as-usual
Thus far, we have compared the individual principles in terms of their implied emissions
allocations for different countries. But countries will also be concerned with the impact of
different proposals relative to business-as-usual. In Charts 4A ­4E and Tables 2-4 below, we
compare the impact of each of five proposals--equal per capita emissions, historic responsibility,
ability to pay, 80-20 cuts, and preservation of future economic opportunities--on different
countries. Specifically, we compute the difference in the annual average emissions growth rate
between each of the scenarios and the emissions growth rate under the business-as-usual scenario
and plot this difference against the per capita GDP of countries.
We obtain emissions growth in BAU from Birdsall and Subramanian (2009), which is optimistic
about technology creation and dissemination in the business-as-usual situation. These technology
assumptions are combined with those about population and per capita GDP to derive BAU
emissions growth.14
We specify the preservation of future economic opportunities principle in the following manner:
we give all countries that have a per capita GDP (PPP) in 2008 of less than US$20,000 their
business-as-usual allocations. This captures the graduation notion that people below certain
thresholds should not have to suffer any consequences (as in Bosetti and Frankel (2009)). For
countries above this threshold, we reduce their emissions allocations proportional to their
business-as-usual levels so that the global carbon budget is respected.
Several features stand out in these charts and tables. First, most proposals are broadly equitable
in that they inflict smaller emissions growth cuts on poorer countries (reflected in the
significantly negative relationship with current GDP per capita in the charts). The exception is
the 80-20 cuts proposal (Chart 4D) which has a strong status quo bias. In fact, this feature is
common to some of the most influential contributions to the literature which have focused on
emissions cuts rather than allocations (Stern, 2007; UNDP, 2008; Bossetti and Frankel (2009);
the Jacoby et al. (2007).15 In Stern (2007) and UNDP (2008) which advocate the 80-20 cuts
proposal and in the Jacoby proposal for 70-30 cuts, the baseline is 1990 emission levels.
When the benchmark is some historical level of emissions, a cuts approach tends to favor the
status quo and hence preserves current inequities. Consider for example the 80-20 cuts proposal
of Stern and the UNDP. At first blush, an 80 per cent reduction by the industrial countries and a
20 per cent reduction by developing countries relative to their 1990 emission levels, appears
strongly progressive. However, its real implications for equity are shown in Panel D below. This
inequity also becomes apparent when we translate the cuts into emissions allocations for
14
The per capita growth assumptions for all countries for the period 2010-2050 are based on convergence
(Appendix Table 1).
15
Kanitkar et. al. (2010) combine cuts with allocations.
21
individual countries. In fact, this allocation can be generated in our encompassing framework
(equation 9 above) with a weight on the adjustment cost principle of 0.85 and a weight of 0.15 on
the equal per capita principle.
A second feature that is illustrated in these charts and Table 2 is that a few large and poor
countries--India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Nigeria, Vietnam, and Pakistan--tend to receive
consistently high allocations. Any allocation that starts from the individual as a unit of analysis
and then aggregates to the level of countries on the basis of population naturally favors large
countries which are on average poorer.16 China, in contrast, experiences cuts in nearly all
scenarios because its per capita income is higher.
It is possible to construct a summary measure of the overall impact on emissions growth of the
different proposals, taking account of a country's size and income level (Table 3). The rationale
here is that we want to give larger weight to countries that are large and poor. As expected, the
80-20 cuts proposal stands out: the average reduction in emissions growth relative to BAU under
this proposal is -2.25 percent which is almost as large as the emissions growth in the BAU
scenario. The ability-to-pay principle generates the least average reductions in emissions
growth.17 The other three proposals produce roughly similar results.
It is worth highlighting that most proposals involve reductions in emissions growth for nearly all
countries (see first row in Table 3). The exception is the proposal to preserve future economic
opportunities, which by construction, insulates 29 low income countries from emissions cuts. But
this only transfers the burden of emissions reductions to high-income countries each of which
suffers a reduction in emissions growth of close to 20 percentage points. Translated into levels of
emissions, this implies that the United States must cut emissions by 125 percent: put differently,
over the next 40 years it would have to add to the atmosphere's capacity as a carbon sink rather
than to deplete it or to finance larger cuts elsewhere.
One point that deserves emphasis relates to the BAU and the related preservation of future
economic opportunities proposals. Business-as-usual emissions levels are closely related to
future economic growth, which is based on some view about each country's prospects.
Alternative growth projections have profound consequences for emissions allocations (for
example, in the projections by EIA (2009), growth is assumed to be 4.9 percent and 3.9 percent,
respectively for China and India. In contrast, the Birdsall and Subramanian (2009) projections
for the two countries, based on assuming convergence, are 4.1 percent and 5.2 percent,
respectively. Convergence has some empirical basis but it also has normative appeal in leaving
room for higher potential growth for those who are currently poorer.
16
In Appendix 2 we show that if we were to apply the same principles directly at the country level, the resulting
allocations would not be so equitable because in our sample large countries are on average poorer.
17
This outcome is in part a consequence of how our summary measure is constructed. This measure attaches a
higher weight to the emissions growth of poorer countries, who are the beneficiaries of more generous allocations
under the ability-to-pay principle.
22
Chart 4. Implications of Alternative Proposals: Change in emissions growth compared to
business-as-usual (annual average % between 2010 and 2050)
A. Equal per capita emissions
10
NGA
VNM
IND
PAK PHL
IDN
MAR
0
UZB EGY COL
IRQ CHN BRA
DZA THA
Percent
UKR TUR
ROMCHL
ARG
MEX
-10
ZAFBLR
IRNVEN
MYS
KAZ
POL
-20
RUS KORJPNNLD
CZEGRC AUT SGP
ITA DEU
ESP AUS
BEL
FRA
GBR USA
CAN
SAUISR ARE KWT
HKG
-30
7 8 9 10 11
Log of GDP (PPP) per capita, 2008
B. Historic responsibility
NGA
VNM
IND PHL
PAK COL
BRA
0
IDN
MAR
EGY
CHN TUR
THA ROMCHL
MEX
ARG
DZA FRA
IRQ UKR BLR
VEN ITA
-5
UZB ESP
ZAF
IRN MYS POL GRCJPNAUT
GBR SGP
KOR DEU
BEL
Percent
RUS CZE
ISR NLD
KAZ
-10
SAU HKG
CAN
AUS
USA
-15
ARE
KWT
-20
7 8 9 10 11
Log of GDP (PPP) per capita, 2008
23
C. Ability-to-pay (based on per capita GDP)
NGA
VNM
IND PHL
PAK COL
BRA
0
IDN
MAR
EGY
CHN TUR
THA ROMCHL
MEX
ARG
DZA FRA
IRQ UKR BLR
VEN ITA
ESP
UZB
-5
ZAF
IRN MYS POL GRC
JPNAUT
GBR SGP
KOR DEU
CZE BEL
Percent
KAZ RUS ISR NLD
-10
SAU HKG
CAN
AUS
USA
-15
ARE
KWT
-20
7 8 9 10 11
Log of GDP (PPP) per capita, 2008
D. 80-20 Cuts
2
SGP
NGA
0
PAK
PHL
Percent
VNM NLD
-2
IND BEL
ARE
BRA
CHN COL GRC
KORJPN
IDN ZAF
RUS FRA
ESP
ITA
KAZTUR SAU GBR
UKR ROM AUS
DEU
MAR VEN
BLRCHL
EGY
-4
THA ARGPOL
MEX CAN
AUT
CZE
IRN ISR USA
KWT
MYS
UZB
IRQ DZA
-6
HKG
7 8 9 10 11
Log of GDP (PPP) per capita, 2008
24
E. Preserving future development opportunities
10
0 NGAPAK IRQ
IND
UZB PHL MAR EGY UKRCOL IRN TURRUS
VNM IDN DZA KAZ MYS
CHN THA ZAFBLRCHLPOL
VEN
BRAROM ARG
MEX
Percent
-10
-20
KORJPNNLD
CZEGRC AUT SGP
ITA DEU
ESP AUS
BEL
FRA USA
GBR
CAN
SAUISR ARE KWT
HKG
-30
7 8 9 10 11
Log of GDP (PPP) per capita, 2008
25
Table 2. Countries least adversely affected under different proposals 1/
1/ A country appears on the list if the difference between its emissions growth in each of the scenarios and that in
the BAU scenario is greater than - 0.5 percent.
26
Table 3. Emissions impact under alternative scenarios consistent with meeting climate
change goals
BAU
1/ Annual average growth rate between 2010 and 2050; calculated as where
p y
i i
e i e i
p
is a
i
p y
i i
country's population share; y
is a country's share in inverse per capita GDP; e i is the annual average emissions
i
BAU
growth between 2010 and 2050 in each of the scenarios; and ei is the annual average emissions growth between
2010 and 2050 in the business-as-usual scenario.
27
Table 4. Cumulative emissions under alternative scenarios and proposals for major
emitters, 2010-2050 (gigatons)
Finally, the implications of some of the other proposals in the literature, shown in the last 3
columns of Table 4, are worth noting. First, none of them generates outcomes that are consistent
with meeting the 2 degrees centigrade guardrail objective which requires respecting the carbon
budget of 704 gigatons for the period 2010-2050. Bosetti and Frankel (2009) devote attention to
adjustment costs and also incorporate graduation criteria for emissions cuts, which leads to
several developing countries, but not China, following their business-as-usual trajectories until
the middle of this century. This proposal is closest in spirit to our preservation of economic
opportunities allocation. However, in accommodating these different constraints, they exceed the
carbon budget. The Jacoby et al. (2007) proposal is interesting because it respects the criterion of
developing countries not losing in welfare terms relative to business-as-usual. But that too does
not meet safe climate change goals.
A different way of noting the difficulty of attaining both climate change and developing country
growth and energy goals is to compare the allocations under BAU, shown in column 1, and those
in column 6 (preserving future economic opportunities). If countries with a per capita GDP of
less than US$ 20,000 were to follow their business-as-usual trajectory, their carbon budget alone
would be about 870 gigatons, requiring high income countries having to reduce their cumulative
emissions drastically from about 540 gigatons (in their business-as-usual trajectories) to ­ 170
gigatons to meet the global carbon budget.
VII. Caveats and Extensions
28
1. Climate adaptation
Our framework for allocating emissions rights does not take into account the costs of adaptation
to climate change, even though some have argued that these costs be considered in any
cooperative agreement (see e.g. Indian submission at
http://unfccc.int/meetings/ad_hoc_working_groups/lca/items/4578.php). How these costs should
influence equitable allocations is not straightforward. On the one hand, if a country would incur
significant costs of adaptation to climate change, equity considerations might dictate a larger
allocation of emissions to it in order to compensate for the loss in welfare. Since poorer countries
and those closer to the equator are more likely to be affected (see Cline (2007), and World Bank
2010), it would be reasonable to use these criteria to reflect fairness for equitable adaptation
calculations. On the other hand, such a country also derives a greater benefit from, and therefore
has a greater stake in, preventing climate change and therefore could be required to make a
greater contribution by way of emission cuts. It is not clear how a balance must be struck
between these conflicting considerations.
2. Graduation at the country level
Several contributors to the literature, including Bhagwati, Spence (2009), and Frankel and
Valenti (2009) have suggested that only countries above a certain threshold level of development
(usually defined in per capita GDP (PPP) terms or based on some human development type of
index) be required to take on emissions cuts and thus contribute to burden sharing. Implicitly,
this approach is akin to allowing countries below this threshold to proceed along their business-
as-usual emissions paths. In our framework, this is taken into account by using income as a
criterion of emissions allocation so that the poorest countries, which are likely to grow faster in
the future, receive larger emissions allocations. The graduation criterion can also be applied at
the individual level, which we discuss below.
3. Intra-national and inter-national equity
Our unit of analysis is the representative individual within a country. Clearly, there is large
inequality within countries as there is across countries, so the assumption that one average-
income earning individual represents the country is not strictly valid. Can our framework allow
for the incorporation of this inequality within countries? Suppose, for analytical simplicity, there
were two types of individuals--rich and poor--within all countries. Suppose too that we defined
rich and poor according to a threshold (akin to a graduation criterion) which dictated that the rich
individuals would not need any space in terms of future growth opportunities by virtue of already
being rich. This would imply that for the rich individuals, in equation 7 above the coefficient on
the per capita GDP term would be zero: that is, income would not be a criterion in determining
fair emissions allocations, because the rich across the world did not need any special treatment.
For poor individuals, however, current income would remain a criterion in determining fair
allocations. So, if we added all the rich and poor individuals within a country to arrive at a
country level allocation of emissions, the coefficient on the income term would be weighted by
the proportion of poor within any given country.
It may be helpful to contrast our approach with that of Cao (2008) and Baer, Athanasiou and
29
Kartha (2007) and Chakravarty et al. who also incorporate intra-national inequality but in a
slightly different manner. In their approach, the question is not the fair allocation of emissions (a
benefit) but the fair allocation of burden sharing (a cost). Since they posit that burdens should
only be shared by individuals above a certain income threshold (defined across all countries),
they focus on measuring the rich within a country and treating this as the unit over which equity
criteria should be applied. Our approach would instead focus on the poor within every country
and ask how much extra allowance must be made when applying the criterion of ability to pay in
order to arrive at country-level emissions.
4. Emissions allocations and technological change
Does it matter for the simulations above if actual technological progress turns out to be faster
than expected? Most of the simulations above yield shares of the total cumulative emissions
budget for a country starting with the representative individual in it as the unit of analysis. These
shares are calculated independently of any assumptions about the pace of technological progress.
If emissions per unit of economic activity decline faster than expected, then for each country a
higher level of economic activity is consistent with any given emissions allocation. In other
words, there is no reason that faster-than-expected technological progress should change the
equitable allocation of emissions.
The one exception is the principle where developing countries receive an emissions allocation
that enables them to achieve business-as-usual growth rates. Here the emissions allocation is
necessarily based on certain assumptions about the pace of technological progress which
determines how the relationship between emissions and economic activity evolves. Faster than
expected technological progress enables developing countries to achieve business-as-usual
growth with lower emissions than their initial allocations. The surplus emissions could then be
reallocated among countries which received more stringent initial allocations.
5. Horizon
Our simulations have allocated cumulative emissions over the next forty years on the basis of
attributes, such as per capita income, observed today. But this may be politically difficult
because it may be neither feasible nor desirable to conclude binding agreements over such a long
horizon especially if the underlying attributes of participants change significantly. Thus, it may
be difficult to tie the hands of governments indefinitely into the future.
An alternative would be to determine targets over a shorter period with no agreement today
about what would happen beyond. The Kyoto Protocol with its in-built expiration date had this
flavor. As noted above, our approach can be adapted to alternative time frames. The problem
with this latter course, of course, is the lack of certainty for market players who need to plan over
longer horizons.
The key choice is to define allocations over a time period that is long enough to create a stable
environment for public and private decisions but not so long that the underlying criteria for
making allocations become irrelevant. A period of ten years has been suggested as reasonable
(Frankel, 2007). The question then would be whether any current agreement would pertain only
30
to the level of allocations over the next 10 years, or also include the rules that would guide future
allocations based on changing circumstances. These rules could cover only the variables on the
basis of which future allocations would be made or also specify how the weights attached to
these variables would evolve. For example, it could be agreed that the weight attached to the
"adjustment cost" term or the historic emissions term would decline in future time periods. Our
framework has the flexibility to allow for all these possibilities.
6. Forests
Do forests deserve special attention in an equity framework? Tropical forests are under pressure
because of the economic incentives to chop them and derive economic value from the resulting
timber and from the land that becomes available by the clearing of forests. Thus, emissions
mitigation to the extent that it involves preserving forests might lead to the loss of economic
opportunities that could be derived from clearing them.18 The question is whether forests should
be part of the general carbon budgeting exercise in the future or whether they should be treated
sui generis, for example, through financial flows. The argument for the latter might simply be
that very few countries have a large stake in the forestry issue. Moreover, this sui generis
treatment seems to be the drift in international discussions, reflected, for example, in the United
Nations' initiative for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD).
VIII. Concluding Remarks and Possible Way Forward
Even as the world contemplates stronger action to reduce CO2 emissions to prevent catastrophic
climate change, how this goal can be accomplished equitably has become central to the debate.
This paper has presented an analytical framework to encompass the existing contributions to the
literature on equity in climate change. It seeks, in particular, to highlight the consequences--in
terms of future emissions allocations--of different approaches to equity.
It seems that there is a shared recognition that the status quo in terms of emissions allocations is
unbalanced. Today, rich countries have substantially greater per capita CO2 emissions--
reflecting substantially higher usage of energy per capita--than poor countries. There is less
agreement on how equity considerations should inform future action on climate change, reflected
in the different proposals that have been made.
Four equity-based principles and related proposals recur in the literature. These suggest that
emissions allocations be: (i) allocated equally on a per capita basis; (ii) inversely related to
historic responsibility for emissions; (iii) inversely related to ability to pay; and (iv) directly
related to future economic opportunities. The case has also been made for taking account of
adjustment costs in emissions allocations.
18
Some authors such as Frankel (2007) and Cao (2009) have suggested that hydrocarbon endowments should be a
factor in equity determinations. The argument presumably is that emissions mitigation, by reducing the price of
carbon will result in a decline in the wealth of countries with large hydrocarbon endowments which should be
compensated. It is difficult to see why countries with large incomes such as Saudi Arabia or the United Arab
Emirates even with their endowments of hydrocarbons would merit compensation. Insofar as hydrocarbon
endowments deserve inclusion in the equity calculus, it is more likely to be appropriate for poorer countries such as
Nigeria and Angola.
31
At first blush, each of the principles discussed above seems to merit inclusion in any
determination of equitable emissions allocations. Thus, privileging any one principle (equal per
capita) or a sub-set of principles (equal per capita and historic responsibility) to the exclusion of
others does not seem justified. But the conclusion--perhaps obvious--seems to be that there
may be reason to favor just one principle: the preservation of future economic opportunities.
Why?
The adjustment costs principle taken in isolation, which motivates formulating equity in terms of
emissions cuts, tends to favor the status quo. Even reasonably progressive cuts relative to historic
levels--for example the 80-20 cuts proposal that implicitly accords primacy to adjustment costs--
tend to favor large current emitters such as the United States, Canada, Australia, the oil exporters
and China, at the expense of the emissions frugal. Cuts relative to business-as-usual tend to favor
countries whose growth forecasts are greatest, particularly China, when forecasts are based on
recent economic performance.
Other principles of equal per capita emissions, historic responsibility and ability to pay favor
some large and poor developing countries such as India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Pakistan and
Nigeria. In any purely equity-based approach going forward, these countries would not be
required to assume onerous mitigation commitments.
However, these equity principles would hurt not just industrial countries but other developing
countries. Thus, a weakness of these proposals is that they would inflict unjustified economic
costs on some poor countries that do not receive emissions allocations needed to sustain growth.
At the same time, the generous allocations provided to the large and poor countries in excess of
their growth needs would amount to unjustified largesse because then climate change would
become an instrument for redressing unrelated inequities.
A weakness of these proposals is that they would, on the one hand, inflict unjustified economic
costs on a large number of poor countries that would not receive emissions allocations needed to
sustain likely growth rates. On the other hand, the proposals would provide allocations to some
countries in excess of their growth needs, which could be seen as unjustified largesse because
then climate change would become an instrument for redressing unrelated inequalities.
The principle of "preserving future development opportunities" is most appealing because it
corresponds closest to the notion that developing countries should not be constrained in the
future by a problem that they did not largely cause in the past. The climate change problem has
imposed a hard "carbon budget" constraint on humanity. In the absence of climate change, there
would not have been such a constraint. The key equity question is whether this hard budget
constraint should bite for developing countries in the sense of curtailing their future economic
opportunities (growth and energy needs). And the answer seems to be that it should not: not just
because they are poor but also because they did not cause much of the problem.19
19
It is worth noting that the historic responsibility matters only to the extent that future opportunities for developing
countries are foreclosed. Developing countries cannot ask to be compensated for the damage to their future
opportunities and also for historic responsibility (assuming, of course, that the motivation behind historic-
responsibility compensation is damage caused, not pure retribution or revenge), because that would be double-
counting.
32
If we assume that incomes of different countries tend to converge over time, which has both
some empirical support and normative appeal, then developing countries have the greatest
economic opportunities. Preserving these opportunities would require emissions allocations to
all developing countries close to their projected business-as-usual levels. As a result, this
principle minimizes conflicts within developing countries. It also has the virtue of not making
climate change an instrument for income redistribution for reasons unrelated to climate change.
However, the burden of meeting climate change goals would then fall entirely on industrial
countries which would be obliged to make drastic cuts in emissions, especially if China's large
business-as-usual emissions have to be accommodated. The resulting economic contraction of
industrial countries would in turn have negative feedback effects on developing countries via the
trade and finance channels.
Hence, one key and broad point that emerges from this review is that conflicts of interest are
both inherent and strong--perhaps irreconcilably so--in discussions of equity in emissions
allocations. They are inherent because the exercise is about allocating a fixed aggregate carbon
budget. They are strong because the budget is not really fixed but shrinking dramatically relative
to the growing needs of developing countries. Science demands drastic compression in aggregate
emissions in order to keep temperatures below reasonable levels with reasonable probability.
Given current rates of technological progress, the available carbon budget is not even adequate to
sustain business-as-usual growth rates for developing countries, let alone for the world as a
whole. The required cuts would only be small enough to be politically acceptable if there were
radical--historically unprecedented--technological breakthroughs that allowed significantly
higher levels of growth and energy consumption for given levels of emissions.
It may, therefore, be desirable to shift the emphasis of international cooperation toward
generating a low-carbon technology revolution; equity would have a key but different role in
shaping such international cooperation.20 Equity would be less about mediating the allocation of
a fixed emissions pie than about informing the contributions of different countries in generating a
low-carbon technology revolution so as to enlarge this pie. Such a revolution can transform
climate change into a non-zero sum game, offering perhaps the only hope of reconciling the
development needs of low-income countries with the climate change goals of humanity.
20
It is an open question as to whether cooperation on generating technological progress should follow the current
paradigm of establishing targets and timetables as part of one grand agreement, or involve a variety of loosely
coordinated smaller scale agreements each one of which addresses a different aspect of the challenge (Barrett and
Toman, 2010).
33
Appendix 1: Deriving Country-Level Emissions from Fair Per Capita Emissions Share21
Equation 7 in the text provides a formula for estimating the fair per capita emissions share for a
country. But we need to derive total emissions for a country. How do we do so?
Recall that the formula for fair per capita emissions share is:
FE
i
P
EQ
i i (1)
FE
i
P
i
We need to derive an expression for FE
i
The overall carbon budget for 2010-2050 (which we set at 704 gigatons for the 50 countries in
our sample) is simply the population times the per capita emissions for each country summed
over all countries, which can be expressed as:
FE
Pi i Available carbon budget for 2010 2050 704 (2)
P
i
Re-writing (1) we get:
FE FE
i EQ i
P i P
i i
EQ
C
i
EQ
P C 705
ii
705
C
EQ
P
ii
This yields the following expression for each country's total emissions as a function of variables
21
We are grateful to Olivier Jeanne for helping us with the derivations below.
34
that we observe and estimate.
EQ 705
FE P
i i i EQ
P
i i
EQ
If is a constant as in equation 2 in the text, then the preceding expression reduces too:
i
705
FE / P
i i P
i
which implies equal per capita allocations across the world.
35
Appendix 2: Impact of the Equity Principles Under Country Level Approach
Recall that in Section IV, we derived the fair emissions share for countries by starting with
individuals and aggregating up to the level of countries. Because of treating individuals as the
unit, our criteria for equity (the various right hand side variables in equation 9) were also
specified for the representative individual. What if we started instead by asking directly what
should determine a country's fair share of emissions?
The first difficulty we encounter is how to specify or scale the variables that capture the equity
principles. For example, in the case of the ability to pay principle, should the variable be
specified as per capita GDP or aggregate GDP? Is a country as rich as its average citizen
(suggesting a per capita specification) or is it as rich as its total output (suggesting an aggregate
specification)? Even though the former criterion has some appeal, its choice would ignore the
size of a country and lead to two countries--say Singapore and the United States--receiving the
same emissions allocations despite their vastly different populations. The latter would respect
scale but could lead to two countries that have similar aggregate GDPs--Indonesia and
Belgium--receiving the same emissions despite their vastly different levels of development.
Similarly, should historic emissions, hydrocarbon endowments or current emissions (which
affects adjustment costs) be scaled by population or not? Nevertheless, to illustrate the
consequences of the country-as-unit as opposed to individual-as-unit we extend the framework in
equation 9 with the only difference that the basic equity question--the left hand side of the
equation--is what a country's fair share of emissions should be. In this case, a country's fair
share of emissions would be:
FE
EQC
i i
FE i
where now FE is a country's total emissions and FE is world emissions and the extra C
i i
superscript denotes the fact that we are now referring to country level emissions. Note the
difference with the comparable specification at the individual which is expressed in equation 1.
For purposes of comparison, we continue to express all the right hand side variables in per capita
terms. We illustrate below the consequences of this change. First, in the charts below, we show
the impact on emissions allocations of the four elements when applied at the country level
(comparable to Charts 3A and 3B in the text). Allocations do not change for the population
variable. But for all the other variables there are substantial differences. Large countries such as
China, India, Indonesia and Brazil get consistently lower allocations under the country level
approach for the obvious reason that there is no scaling variable. Two countries with the same
per capita income will receive the same allocations regardless of their population.
36
Chart 1A. Cumulative emissions allocations, 2010-2050 (gigatons)
37
Chart 1B. Cumulative emissions allocations, 2010-2050 (gigatons)
Note: With one exception, both charts show allocations for the major countries if each of the principles were the
sole basis for allocations (i.e. as if the alphas in equation 9 in the text were set to one).
We next illustrate the impact of one of the proposals based on the country level approach on
emissions allocations relative to BAU (analogous to Chart 4C in the text). Here emissions
allocations to a country depend only on a country's per capita GDP, or more specifically on its
inverse share of GDP per capita. This is exactly one the scenarios considered in Jacoby et. al
(2007).22
22
They, however, measure GDP per capita at market exchange rates and their sample is a combination of countries
and regions.
38
Chart 2. Implications of ability-to-pay principle
Change in emissions growth compared to business-as-usual (annual average % between
2010 and 2050)
VNM MAR
NGAUZB PHL
5
BLR
PAK IRQ COL
ROMCHL
EGY
DZA KAZ SGP
IDN UKR ISR
CZEGRC
0
THA VEN AUT
ARG
MYS
ZAF TUR BEL
KWT
IND BRA ARE
POL HKG
IRN
-5
NLD
Percent
MEX
SAU
ESP
ITA
-10
KOR FRA
AUS
GBR
-15
CAN
RUS
DEU
JPN
-20
CHN USA
7 8 9 10 11
Log of GDP (PPP) per capita, 2008
Note that in the chart above (as in Chart 3B in the text), the relationship is downward sloping.
But the relationship when allocations start with the country as unit (as in the chart above) is
much less equitable because the correlation with income is -.54 compared with a correlation of -
0.95 when allocations start with the individual is the unit of analysis. The big difference is in the
magnitudes of the reduction in emissions growth which is substantially greater for countries such
as China and India. For example, under the individual level approach, China's emissions growth
declines relative to BAU by -3 percent but under the country level approach it declines by over
20 percent. The comparable numbers for India are 3.5 percent and -3.3 percent, respectively. The
regressive nature of the country level approach is also revealed when we compute the weighted
average decline in emissions (where the weights reflect both a country's population share and
GDP per capita share (inverse). This weighted average decline is -5.3 percent under the country
level approach and 0.17 percent under the individual level approach. It must be noted that this
39
difference arises even though both use the same principle for allocation (ability-to-pay) and
quantified it in the same way (inverse share of per capita GDP).
This contrast between the individual and country level approaches has not been adequately
recognized in the literature but it is an important one that has come up in discussions in other
contexts, most notably the allocation of quotas in the IMF and what the appropriate formula
ought to be (see Bryant (2010) for a discussion).
Which of these two is the better approach? While the country-level approach is favored by most
contributions, there may be reasons to begin with the individual as the unit of analysis.
Ultimately, people have rights and countries' rights and obligations derive from individuals (see
Stern (2007)). 23 Further, it seems more intuitive and consistent to specify the principle when the
unit is the individual. For example, consider two states within the United States, say California
and Rhode Island. If emissions were being allocated across states, it seems more likely that an
individual level approach--which treated all Americans rather than all states as equal--would be
favored. There are no ethical reasons why the same should not apply across countries.
23
Note that the thought experiment we are doing is very similar--in the sense of starting with individuals--to the
thought experiment that Stern (2009) suggests we undertake when thinking about the appropriate discounting of the
future.
40
Appendix 3: Correlations between principles
The table below shows the pair-wise correlations between each of the four principles discussed
in equation 9 in the text.
41
Appendix Table 1: Data and Their Sources
co2_emission_mil gdp_ppp_percap20 mtco2e_1970t
Variable pop_2008 g_bau e_bau
_mettons_2008 08 o2006
Carbon
Cumulative Per capita GDP
dioxide
Carbon dioxide Population in Gross domestic carbon dioxide growth in
Description emissions in
emissions year 2008 product per capita emissions from business-as-
business-as-
1970 to 2006 usual
usual
in millions metric in metric tons
Unit in millions in US dollars in % in %
tons carbon
Climate
World Bank International Analysis
World Bank
(WB) World Monetary Fund Indicator Tool Birdsall and Birdsall and
(WB) World
Source Development (IMF) World (CAIT) World Subramanian Subramanian
Development
Indicators Economic Outlook Resources (2009) (2009)
Indicators (WDI)
(WDI) (WEO), April 2010 Institute
(WRI)
Country
China 6,534 0 5,999 89,775 4.1 1.1
US 5,833 0 47,393 185,369 1.7 0.8
Russia 1,729 0 15,941 69,225 3.1 0.0
India 1,495 0 2,790 22,768 5.2 2.8
Japan 1,214 0 33,957 38,639 2.1 0.6
Germany 829 0 35,539 35,713 2.3 0.1
Canada 574 0 39,080 16,640 1.9 0.5
UK 572 0 36,233 20,995 2.3 0.3
Korea_Rep 542 0 27,681 9,457 2.4 0.2
Iran 511 0 11,026 7,614 3.6 2.0
Saudi Arabia 466 0 23,489 6,316 2.7 1.9
Italy 455 0 30,520 14,651 2.2 0.3
South Africa 451 0 10,442 9,301 3.6 1.1
Mexico 445 0 14,528 10,214 3.3 2.1
Australia 437 0 38,356 9,486 1.9 0.6
Indonesia 434 0 3,980 5,812 4.8 2.8
Brazil 428 0 10,512 8,215 3.5 1.9
France 415 0 34,204 15,085 2.3 0.2
Spain 359 0 30,815 8,357 2.1 0.0
Ukraine 350 0 7,342 18,306 3.8 0.8
Poland 299 0 17,556 13,134 2.3 0.5
Turkey 272 0 13,107 4,897 3.8 2.0
Netherlands 264 0 40,558 5,966 2.3 0.0
42
Appendix Table 1 (contd.): Data and Their Sources
co2_emission_mil gdp_ppp_percap mtco2e_1970to20
Variable pop_2008 g_bau e_bau
mettons 2008 2008 06
Cumulative Per capita
Gross domestic Carbon dioxide
Carbon dioxide Population in carbon dioxide GDP growth in
Description product per emissions in
emissions year 2008 emissions from business-as-
capita business-as-usual
1970 to 2006 usual
in millions metric in metric tons
Unit in millions in US dollars in % in %
tons carbon
International
Climate Analysis
World Bank World Bank Monetary Fund
Indicator Tool Birdsall and Birdsall and
(WB) World (WB) World (IMF) World
Source (CAIT) World Subramanian Subramanian
Development Development Economic
Resources (2009) (2009)
Indicators (WDI) Indicators (WDI) Outlook (WEO),
Institute (WRI)
April 2010
Country
Thailand 254 0 8,232 3,576 5.0 2.3
UAE 199 0 37,442 1,956 3.0 1.4
Kazakhstan 199 0 11,434 7,611 5.0 1.0
Venezuela 184 0 12,717 3,981 3.8 2.1
Argentina 172 0 14,408 4,127 3.8 2.4
Egypt 165 0 5,897 2,951 4.3 2.7
Malaysia 162 0 14,082 2,310 4.8 3.1
Singapore 159 0 51,846 932 4.8 0.3
Belgium 155 0 36,345 4,517 2.2 0.2
Pakistan 148 0 2,624 2,258 5.4 4.5
Uzbekistan 125 0 2,599 4,448 5.0 3.4
Greece 107 0 30,189 2,498 2.2 0.1
Algeria 106 0 6,753 2,142 5.5 4.6
Romania 103 0 12,638 5,231 3.9 1.0
Czech Republic 102 0 25,061 5,458 2.3 0.4
Iraq 101 0 3,477 2,021 4.8 4.1
Nigeria 100 0 2,162 2,116 5.4 5.7
Vietnam 94 0 2,794 1,190 4.9 3.0
Hong Kong 84 0 43,754 1,344 4.8 2.7
Kuwait 82 0 39,941 1,471 2.7 1.6
Philippines 80 0 3,515 1,750 4.8 3.4
Austria 70 0 39,887 2,223 2.2 0.1
Israel 70 0 28,474 1,334 2.4 1.2
Belarus 68 0 12,313 3,130 3.8 0.9
Colombia 65 0 8,928 1,778 3.8 2.6
Chile 65 0 14,592 1,252 3.2 1.8
Morocco 40 0 4,362 844 5.6 3.5
Note: For historic emissions, Hong Kong's was assumed to be the same in per capita terms as Singapore. Emissions
for some of the Former Soviet Union countries for the early 1990s were extrapolated backwards.
43
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